th St., N.W. Washington, DC Phone: (202) Lily Eskelsen García President. Delegates to the 2017 NEA Representative Assembly

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1 th St., N.W. Washington, DC Phone: (202) Lily Eskelsen García President Rebecca S. Pringle Vice President Princess R. Moss Secretary-Treasurer John C. Stocks Executive Director MEMO TO: FROM: Delegates to the 2017 NEA Representative Assembly Lily Eskelsen García, President National Education Association DATE: June 15, 2017 RE: NEA Media Campaign Fund Attached is the annual report on the NEA Media Campaign Fund for the NEA fiscal year as required in Bylaw 2-7n. The annual membership dues of Active members of the Association, as computed pursuant to Bylaw 2-7.a include $20 which is allocated to the Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises and Media Campaign Fund. Sixty percent (60%) of the dues were allocated to the Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund and is available to assist state affiliates in dealing with ballot measures and legislative crises, and forty percent (40%) is available for national and state media campaigns. The NEA Media Campaign Fund includes two components. The first provides funding for national campaigns to advance the cause of public education and publicize the role of the Association and its affiliates in improving the quality of public education. The second provides funds for grants to NEA state affiliates for communication campaigns created and directed by state Associations. This report provides a summary of fund activity since the 2016 NEA Representative Assembly. Attachment

2 NEA MEDIA CAMPAIGN FUND ANNUAL REPORT JUNE 2017 SUMMARY The NEA Media Campaign Fund is allocated into two separate funds, a national campaign fund and a state affiliate campaign assistance fund. The promotional efforts supported by these funds have helped to boost the image of NEA and its affiliates as leaders in the cause of providing a high quality public education for every student, regardless of ZIP code. Administration of the funds falls under the responsibilities of the NEA Center for Communications. NATIONAL PROMOTIONS Pursuant to actions taken by the NEA Board of Directors, the majority of media campaign funds were re-allocated to provide financial support for the Association s efforts to promote public education and public school educators positive work. The remainder of the available funds haves been used to support very specific and targeted promotional efforts. Those expenditures included: GOAL 1- STRONG AFFILIATES Public and Member Engagement and Advocacy The Center for Communications (CFC) team partnered with the Center for Advocacy on several projects to promote public education initiatives and defend against attacks on public schools. As part of NEA s presidential election campaign, opportunities were presented to both increase engagement of public education activists while also ensuring that educators and public education were part of the national debate. We partnered with Blue State Digital to create a digital advocacy engagement plan that would support the Strong Public Schools campaign, focusing on communicating with activists through , social media, and promoted content. We also created content that was shared with state affiliates to support their activist engagement efforts. NEA sponsored an event hosted by the Atlantic at the Democratic National Convention that focused on public education in the presidential election. Communications utilized radio media tours on several occasions to get NEA President Lily Eskelsen García and members from around the country on local radio shows to talk about public education and promote our candidates. Communications supported the member voices project where we trained and used members in the media to promote public education in the election. This was particularly successful in targeted presidential states where Donald Trump s influence on students and bullying in schools became a primary issue. Finally, we partnered with Campaign and Elections on post-election polling to better understand the public education electorate. As part of our efforts to support the federal advocacy efforts, Communications partnered with Government Relations to place targeted ads aimed at public education advocates to contact Senators telling them to reject the nomination of Betsy DeVos. We also partnered with Government Relations and the Office of General Counsel to drive ads targeting this same audience in engaging activists around the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch. Communications has invested in the SWAT program to assist state affiliates when facing crises and capacity issues where we can support their communication programs. We partnered with the Arkansas Education Association to help defeat a voucher bill in the legislature, working with them to produce materials for the media and engaging members to contact their legislators. NEA MEDIA CAMPAIGN FUND ANNUAL REPORT JUNE

3 . GOAL 2 GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS The Center for Communications team supports our Goal 2: Great Public Schools work by producing and promoting videos and other content on neatoday.org, nea.org and, other NEA owned media channels. We also drive traffic to this content via various forms of promotional strategies. Some of this promotional content has been focused on how to start the year off well, information on the Every Student Succeeds Act and ensuring every student has a great school. Public And Member Engagement And Organizing The Center for Communications team that supports the work of the Center for Organizing utilized the media fund to drive a variety of strategic organizing initiatives. This included funding campaign communications specialists to provide rapid response support work in key states over the last year. This helped the affiliates create a more advanced and comprehensive communications program for issue and advocacy organizing of the public and members. Specifically, we created critical public engagement strategy centered around Community Schools in Georgia that provided a positive alternative to the Governor s bid to create a privatized state-wide school district that would harm students and remove local control. We are now using what we learned in Georgia to build a campaign in Colorado Springs, Colo. (an extremely hostile area to the Association and one of our greatest growth opportunities) to build partnerships with parents and allied groups to push back on the privatization of our public schools. We also helped facilitate the work of our partners to expose bad actors like the Walton Family Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and bring more transparency to the federal funding (and abuse) of new charters. DUDE. WHAT A SURPRISE! The Lunch Bunch at John R. Rogers High School in Spokane, Wash. was served up some one-of-a-kind surprises during Education Support Professionals Day, courtesy of the Dude. be nice (DBN) Project and NEA. Dude. be nice is an apparel and media company that strives to inspire people to build a positive community by recognizing a person or group in a fun, creative, and meaningful way. To recognize National Education Support Professionals Day, NEA worked with DBN and Rogers students to set up a day-long series of surprises for the kitchen staff, and to honor all ESP members at Rogers. The day of surprises was captured in a video pilot project produced by Dude. be nice that, to date, has received 800,000 hits online. Center For Social Justice Do you hear us? A video exploration into the hearts of our students. In their voices, students Grim, Mecca, Sarah, Nesha, Joshua, Garrett, and Hannah, artistically express their thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the impact of racism on their lives and of students similarly situated to them. Their performances have been viewed more than 15,000 times to drive traffic to neaedjustice.org and to engage the public via social media. National Events And Partnerships NEA s national ad campaign continues to highlight the power of public schools and public education. The ads are featured on national TV, radio, extensively on social media platforms, and major web pages throughout the country. To confront ongoing attacks on public education, NEA continued our partnership with Media Matters for America, which supports a team dedicated to monitoring, fact-checking, and improving national media coverage of education issues. They also produced a map of the interconnections of the far-right infrastructure dedicated to the privatization of our public schools making it far easier to explain how mega-donors like the Walton Family Foundation and others are funding groups to release pro-privatization research, the pundits who promote those findings and finally, the groups that implement the work on the ground. 4 NEA MEDIA CAMPAIGN FUND ANNUAL REPORT JUNE 2017

4 NEA also partnered with Netroots Nation, the country s largest gathering of progressive activists and journalists, to promote NEA s issue advocacy on charter accountability, equity, and other key education issues. National media funds supported prominent positioning for NEA at the 2017 Education Writers Association (EWA) national conference held in Washington D.C. in June. This year s conference featured NEA leaders and voices who led a discussion of A New Era for Education and the Press. EWA s National Seminar is the largest annual gathering of journalists on the education beat. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of NEA s Read Across America program, funds were used to produce a member resource calendar, free to all NEA members, to help them celebrate the anniversary by focusing on diverse books highlighted in the calendar. NEA also partnered with Auritt, a media company that specializes in national satellite media tours, to expand the national reach of Read Across America. The day-long series of remote TV and radio interviews from a DC studio garnered more than 8 million in broadcast/online coverage. A total of 29.2 million people were reached through total earned media coverage (print, broadcast, online, social), which was five times the amount of coverage from the previous year. State Affiliate Advertising Assistance Program When the NEA Representative Assembly established the NEA Media Campaign Fund, 20 percent (20%) of the available funds were specifically earmarked for providing grants to state Associations to create advertising initiatives and/or to expand the reach and activities of existing state advertising efforts. The NEA Representative Assembly also established a broad-based advisory group to make decisions on how funds are expended and create guidelines and criteria for how those decisions are made. State Affiliate Advertising Assistance Advisory Group George Sheridan, NEA Executive Committee Member, California Rudolph Burrus, NEA Board of Directors, Pennsylvania Sandra Walker, NEA Board of Directors, Kansas Becky Higgins, President, Ohio Chris Baumann, Executive Director, Georgia Amanda Chaney, Communications Consultant, Tennessee Cyndi Menzel, State Education Asccociation (SEA Comm) President-elect, California Kym Randolph, Communications Director, West Virginia Rebecca Zoglman, Communications Director, California Ramona Oliver, Senior Director NEA Center for Communications, (Advisory Group Chair) Criteria, guidelines, and application forms are distributed annually to state Association presidents, executive directors, NEA Board members, and state Association communications directors. At the request of NEA state affiliates, the NEA State Media Advisory Group considers and approves grants in the NEA fiscal year in which the grant will be provided. For the NEA fiscal year, the Advisory Group reviewed seven competitive grant applications submitted by seven NEA state affiliates. Funds requested were $886,700 for $3.483 million of available funds. NEA MEDIA CAMPAIGN FUND ANNUAL REPORT JUNE

5 After careful review and a full debate, the Advisory Group was able to fully or partially fund seven proposals to seven states, totaling $886,700. These funds were made available to state affiliates during the NEA fiscal year. The balance of what is in the fund will carry over to next year. NEA state affiliates that have received funding during the budget year are: ARIZONA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION $50,000 FLORIDA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION $200,000 NEA NEW MEXICO $85,000 OKLAHOMA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION $175,000 NEA RHODE ISLAND $92,500 SOUTH CAROLINA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION $98,200 WISCONSIN EDUCATION ASSOCIATION COUNCIL $186,000 TOTAL AWARDED FOR $886,700 *After the printing of this report but before the conclusion of the fiscal year, 13 applications requesting $3.726 million are scheduled to be reviewed. Approvals will be recorded in the next report. 6 NEA MEDIA CAMPAIGN FUND ANNUAL REPORT JUNE 2017

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